Blog

Meet the Dev: ideas are extremely fragile

February 17, 2019

Hi I’m Víctor, and I’m the concept designer of the team. One of the things that I like to do is to think outside the box, but what I like even more than that is to try to help my teammates and provide them with whatever they need. Let me explain you why I love to be a part of this family.

We’re a small video game design team, we’ve worked together for 2 and a half years. One thing that I believe we’ve learned is the importance of listening, because as we all know, the very best ideas, can very often come from the quietest voices. Ideas are extremely fragile, ideas are not predictable in terms of when you’ll have them and how many you’re gonna have. And so, over the time, we’ve tried to create a team, and an environment that I think increases the probability of coming up with good ideas, and when they actually happen, it also helps to nurture them. My whole own mark in this group is to ask an awful lot of questions, to have my head down and work, and ignore in some sense all the reasons why something couldn’t be possible.

Designing and the process of making really should be inseparable; for every single object that you see in the game, countless of concepts had to be designed, 3 dimensional prototypes had to be created and experimented with. You understand the nature of a videogame so much more, when you understand how it came to be. And that’s why I love what I do.

Meet the Dev: further horizons

January 27, 2019

Hi! I am Sara García, Lead Artist of Cygnus Void. Today it’s my turn to talk a little about my experience in the project.

I joined the team pretty much when the idea of Project Infinite just started, but I never thought we could arrive this far. I started out as a concept artist and I was supposed to stay like that at the beginning: doing some drawings and designs sporadically, like this one:

However, with time, I found myself more and more involved with the project, with its universe, its characters, its ideas, etcetera. We could say I was one of the first members to hear about the base of our current lore from its creator, Carles: 40 pages full of crazy, strange and a bit incoherent Anak’krasus lore ideas, but that in fact were really interesting.

Since that day I have been providing more support to the Cygnus Void team doing a lot of different things (writing lore and dialogs, doing storyboards, participating in the game design and the project management, among others). I became less shy and started to give my opinion on everything, trying to do my best and the best of Cygnus Void. Because, as my teammates probably know by now, I am quite the perfectionist so I always try to take care of every single detail, even if that drives them crazy sometimes xD

Being in Cygnus Void is hard sometimes, but my global experience here has been very positive, and I hope we can carry out our project and reach ever further horizons than the ones we have already reached.

And I will leave it here for now so that’s it for today! Hope you liked it, and here’s my Instagram account if any of you want to check my work~ @saruka_studio

Maybe in the next post I could share something about the development of the universe and lore of Project Infinite, but we’ll see 👀

See you soon!

Meet the Dev: the visuals behind P.I

December 16, 2018

Hello! Carles Folch here, today we’ll talk about the visuals of P.I and how important they are for our project.

Now, you may think: woah, this is wrong, for making a good game you don’t need good visuals.

That is true, partially, but for making a good game you do need inputs that make the player feel something in particular, immersion that translates into having fun.

That’s why the visuals are important in P.I; we need them in order to make the players feel what we want them to feel, we need to express our vast universe in the forms that define giant alien temples, color palettes that transmits the loneliness and coldness of a distant planet… and much more.

Of course there’s a lot of ways to represent what I just explained, and Unreal Engine is the path to follow.

In fact, when we started with the first base concepts in the engine, our visuals where clunky and odd, but it was our starting point, we materialized what we had in mind and then said: ”Okay, we like what this makes us feel, but it’s not quite there, let’s continue.”

This hunger for shaping better our idea pushed us to improve ourselves drastically, and we achieved results that pleased us. We are sure that with our team we can achieve the certain level of quality we desire.

That’s why we decided to start the prototype, because we had an idea and a vision, so Cygnus Void team started to make it real.

Nonetheless we are still and every day aiming for more; our milestones get more ambitious as time passes by, so do we.

As I said, we use cgi for concept too: we combine traditional concept art with 3d to get our ideas right.

As a lead 3D artist I’m very proud of how we are improving, and as a game director I am so happy that we are following relentlessly our dreams in Cygnus Void.

Meet the Dev: from past to present

Let’s make a quick refresh of the beginning of Project Infinite, when it was just an idea. I remember well the moment Carles asked me if i wanted to be part of his project, and I gladly accepted and then we started working on it. At that time I didn’t have the title of graphic designer in the project, I began working just as a concept artist, drawing possible landscapes and providing ideas. My first concept was a photomontage of a desert that helped to create the first images of the game.

And this small demo was the starting shot of Project Infinite; with these first images we were able to attract some new members that wanted to be part of the game. Now, we are a small, multidisciplinary family always wanting to improve.

But let’s not dwell too much in the past, and let’s talk about the present, this very moment. Right now, I’m no longer a concept artist; thanks to the very talented and creative artists that we have on the team, I’m allowed to be fully dedicated on the graphic design, mainly working on the branding and the ingame UI design. Some days ago, I created the website with the help of Sara, our lead artist, to help you get closer to the project and create a contact point between you, our readers and supporters, and us, the Cygnus Void team.

And this will be all for now, I hope you liked it! On my next post, I will talk more about the creation of the UI and its evolution.

New horizons

We went to Barcelona Games World because we had the opportunity to meet with various videogame companies through the matchmaking program that took place within the fair.

We are really pleased with how the meetings went; the feedback, advice and all the possible synergies encouraged us with even more motivation!

Also we made some good networking in the the Indie area: we met Baby Robot Games, the Game Forger, Distorsion Games and more.

It’s always nice to meet with other developers and exchange a couple of words with them!

And everything went really well in the matchmaking zone. Meeting and talking to some of the companies was crazy stuff, high quality feedback right there; we achieved what we thought was at first impossible, once again.

Now we finish a stage and begin a new one, and it’s time to let go of past things and create new ones, life is just like a complex iterative design, I guess.

But we’ll never forget the essence of what makes us what we are, we’ll never forget our origins, we remain strong with passion and ambition.

Cygnus Void is evolving and now we are ready for new horizons.

Oh, and we met some hardcore sci-fi geeks like us too, right, Isaac?

In the end we enjoyed some japanese food too, which was well deserved after spending more than 10 hours in very stressful and impotant meetings. Besides, our man Andreu can’t think with an empty stomach.

Stay tuned because this is only the beginning.

Meet the Dev: concept art, dreams & memes

November 24, 2018

Alba López here, one of the concept artists working in Project Infinite! This week, it’s my turn to write on our blog, so let’s begin by talking a little bit about myself and my work, shall we?

Truth to be told, I haven’t been a member of the Cygnus Void team from the very beginning. I finally decided to join last year, in late September, even though they had already expressed their interest in me two years ago. However, at that time, I hesitated and declined to work with them, instead I told them I would help them out through collaborations, if they wanted to, because I wasn’t really sure of what I wanted to do–

But now I do regret not joining them sooner.

I have been drawing my whole life, ever since I was a little kid. I spent hours and hours doodling and coloring books, coming up with random worlds and characters and the silliest of the stories. But it wasn’t until late 2013 that I decided to really improve and put time and effort into my art skills, so that I could develop a style of my own and understand how all the aspects of art worked. I wanted to become better, so I started drawing every single day if I could, focusing on one thing at the time and trying to practice it until it came out easily. And who am I kidding, I just wanted to be able to draw Attack on Titan lmao ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have also been playing games ever since I can remember, so naturally I wanted to find a way, something, that could let me combine both of these passions into one thing only, if possible. I felt quite lost for a large part of my adolescence trying to find something that fell into those terms, until I discovered the world of game art design. Now, I knew there had to be someone working behind all that art and beautiful visuals, but I didn’t exactly know how it was carried out. So when I researched more about it and found out about all the endless possibilities I had in front of me, how I could make my wishes come true, I felt so relieved!

And Cygnus Void provided me just that.

I guess what held me back at first was that I had little to no experience in the field, besides I still felt that I wasn’t that good, so I was a bit scared to become a part of something that big… But I’m so happy that I chose to join. Even though we know each other from class, working as a group under such circumstances is so different and it only has made our bond stronger. We have fought, we have laughed, we have cried, we have learned and grown so much together… We’re practically a family now (´｡･ω･｡｀)

And we still have a long way to go, but the world better be prepared for us! We are Cygnus Void, and here we come!!

By the way!! If you wanna see more of my work (unrelated and sometimes related to Project Infinite), you can follow me on my Instagram art account @ lule.art!! Thank you as always for your support, and see you next time! Toddles ~☆

Meet the Dev: inside Project Infinite and UE4

November 17, 2018

Hi Roger Ordóñez here, lead programmer of Cygnus Void. I’m the one pulling strings from the shadows to make the Project Infinite a game. In other words my work is to translate the will of the team to code, so it does what development team has thought it may be interesting for you all to play with.

Whoa that’s amazing ! You may think, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

We are currently working with Unreal Engine 4 as our IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It’s a nice environment, with great capabilities. Some great games made with it are Gears of War, Mass Effect or Rocket League to name a few. Also Fortnite was made with it, but let us talk a bit more of the engine.

Unreal Engine is a nice tool if you know how to use it, for sure. It is compatible with most of the actual platforms where you can play games, from pc, xbox, playstation and switch to mobile and web.

One of the things i like the most from Unreal Engine is it’s workflow and usability. Unlike other IDEs I’ve been working with, like RPG Maker or Unity, you have a nice way to move and visualize things.

One important thing unreal engine bring to the table is it’s great render capabilities. Unreal in my opinions have the most accessible lightning environment to work with combined with a great use of material resources in PBR materials.

But let’s talk a bit about how hard is to get that realistic feel with the engine.

I’ve made a quick setup for display purposes, with starting content from Unreal Engine. It took me about 5 minutes to make an “Island” but the point here is not the speed, its the “starter content” Unreal Engine provide us. In Other engines you start with nothing, if you ever used one you may have some ground to start with in terms of code or assets, but Unreal takes the reusage proces one step forward and give you the possibility to start doing things out of the box, with no previous work.

OK I get it, Unreal Engine give you a lot of easy ways to work, but how about the code ?

Well in terms of code, Unreal have two main ways of do things, C++ code and Blueprints. C++ is a common language used in many programs, video games included as a way to communicate with the PC to make it do things like for example play a sound or paint some pixels when you press the mouse, like paint.

Blueprints takes C++ and makes it affordable for people with little to no knowledge about coding making the code not text based but visual instead.

This is how a blueprint looks like, the code is made of little blocks which execute a command and jumps to the next block, in this case when the game starts we say the message “Hello readers”. This makes the code easy to craft, fast to test, and most of the times prevents us from making errors, most common ones in coding are for example misspelling and bad use of parameters and loops.

Blueprints are not perfect, you can make a game entirely of blueprints. When working with huge structures of code you can have a visual mess of blocks connected.

Here you can take a peek of one of our code blocks from our game. It’s not the biggest one nor the most complicated but you get my point on the “visual mess” i was talking before.

Ok, we’ve talked about the visual capabilities, the ease of use of code, what about the UI (user interface)

Well Unreal Engine have a system for UI, the Widget system. Instead of having to make UI from graphics and code and make it costly in terms of time to implement an UI you have a system that works in a component based system, which means that you can do personalized parts of the UI like a life Bar, with its functionalities and then add it to another widget with other ones to make the UI.

Here you can see the life bar Widget, it works as a independent block and can be used as many times as needed and because it works as it is you can focus on it directly without having to touch other parts of the UI or having a big cluster of code for the entire UI, making it simpler and reusable and easy to change if needed.

Well we talked about a lot of concepts, and we’ve seen how it works but I must return to the void so I can continue making the game for you all to play. If you have any questions about the making of the game (programming part) you can ask us on our social media, because twitter and instagram works in Tahshur for some reason.

Meet the Dev: origins of Project Infinite

November 10, 2018

Hello there! I am Carles Folch, CEO and game director of Cygnus Void and Project Infinite.

For now on, we will use this blog to show what’s cooking behind the scenes in our project, cause there’s more than what meets the eye!
Every week a member of the team will update this blog with content of their respective discipline, and what a better way than starting with myself, right?

Everything began the summer of 2016. I had in mind an abstract idea of a story, something with a very deep meaning for me.

My inner self was trying to say something to me so I started to let out all these thoughts through ideas and sketches. I suddenly needed to express my emotions and my internal world through

that story, I felt that I was unveiling something that was buried very deep inside me, and that made me so pleased yet so hungry for more.

As my concept idea started growing, I began to share it with my college friends, and some of them were curious about it, so we established a group of multimedia students and started to experiment with videogame development in order to tell this story.

And then it began to transmute into something bigger. There were people who didn’t understand the whole concept, who left the early project, but there were others who saw my vision and were interested in working on it, so they helped me feed it with their creativity and talent. It was no longer my story, it was our story, our universe. This project became a philosophy of companionship, a way to see beyond the horizon; it became Cygnus Void, it became Project Infinite.

Now that I expressed some of my inner thoughts I’ll talk about the development (finally!).

When we started the brainstorming with Andreu, the current 3D animator, we found out that Unreal Engine was a very good choice to begin with. We needed those tools for making an inmersive experience, so we started learning by our own while combining the knowledge we learned on our multimedia career too.

The results were weird, unconnected and vague, but it was a good starting point. Some call this iterativity, I call it nonconformity.

As we expanded our knowledge of game development and design, our story and universe started to grow even more too. I worked on the context of the project since day one, so Project Infinite’s lore grew massively. The other devs were quite surprised and overwhelmed about the 40 page lore document that I was working on, nonetheless they understood the essence.

There was one dev that understood everything, Sara, the project manager and lead artist, and it was so helpful to have another person debate and question my scripts. She helped me in maturing the consolidation of a deep and vast universe for the context of our videogame project.

…And because this is starting to be way too long, I’ll leave it here for today! Next day, I’ll resume explaining our origins. Thanks for reading (as well as supporting us, everything is very much appreciated :)! ).

Project Infinite Prototype 1.0.1 update

November 5, 2018

In Cygnus Void we have been working on our P.I prototype for quite a long time, so we are finally getting ready to show our efforts to the world, right here in Barcelona.

Games World is at the end of this month, and there we will unveil in-game footage of our prototype.

As final year students we advance slowly but steadily nonetheless, and our milestones are being completed one step at a time.

And as a small Indie team we are gaining invaluable experience in game development from facing all the problems and issues that may come up in our way, and thus we keep advancing and getting better.

In our P.I prototype 1.0 we want to show the whole essence of our project, the key factors that define the concept behind Project Infinite, on a small scale.

We are ready to make it real! Are you ready to see it all?

We are creating a new web!

November 1, 2018

We want to show you all our advances and progress about Project Infinite through a new pretty cool web!

For now on we will upload more content and news about the game to the web in order to keep you updated. Stay tunned!